A Mirror Floating in Water

(2001) Dir. Robert Altman

What a dream this film is! It's not very often that we see a director, well past his prime, still making films that are comparable to the ones he made in his youth.

I usually always contend that the best places to see a film is in the theater, but I think that the ideal setting for watching this film may be in the comfort of your bed, after midnight as it appears on a public televsioin station.

Or maybe I'm just projecting my own childhood nostaliga. My mother, having been a great fan of the countryhouse mystery had me raised on Poriot and Agatha Christe. And thus there is a kind of beautiful familiarity with the structure of the film upon watching it. Throughout his career, Altman has taken genres and turned them upside down on their head, to the point to which a film like M*A*S*H becomes an anti-war film or McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an anti-Western.

Well, Gosford Park is more subtle in its deconstruction, but is just as satirical. It is wonderful to see a film like this come out with such a big cast (with hugely familiar faces left and right for those who were raised watching the BBC channel), such witty dialouge and concern for its characters. It is amazing how Altman is able to fit in over twenty different characters in the confines of a little over two hours and make each and every one of them more real than any of the leading stick figures we see in most films today.

Yes this film is about a countryhouse murder, but that's just an excuse, a McGuffin for Altman to explore the lives and class-system of both the lower and upper classes of the English in the 1930's.

The film opens with the most magnificent opening in all of Altman with a dreary rainy morning, the camera concealed by the overreaching hands of bare leafless trees, raindrops dripping from their edges.

It is such an ideal atmospheric setting for a countryhouse mystery, for it is both sinister and yet comforting. And that pretty much descirbes Altman's approach to the film. He understands the workings of the countryhouse mystery fully; that the comforting setting of these labyrinths of mansions create a sort of juxtaposition with the more darker forces a work.

And yet, when the murder occurs half-way through the film, Altman's camera is about just as callous as the snobbish Countance of Trentham (played mastefully by Maggie Smith) who doesn't know what "all of the fuss is about".

Stephen Fry is hilarious as the humble inspector who arrives to solve the case, and whom never seems to be able to get his name out due to the constant babbling among the pretenscious upper class characters. It's quite amazing what Altman does to give his characters more depth, despite limited onscreen time, for inspite of the fact that Fry's character is probably only onscreen for no more than fifeteen minutes among the jumbling crowd of characters, all we need is to catch a glimpse of his tall Englishman stature and his pipe and we already know everything about him.

It's quirky touches like those that make the film so enjoyable and funny. Take Moris Weissman for instance, an American Hollywood director who happens to be a vegetarian and shrieks when he goes out to go bird shooting (only to watch of course), and yet is wearing this huge fox fur coat.

Maggie Smith is just great and steals every single scene she's in, merely by throwing out one snobbish comment. For example, when she's uncomfortably talking with an American actor, she causually throws out "it must be rather disappointed when something flops like that" (in regards to his last film).

Like so many other Altman films, there are so many characters, with so much overlapping dialouge (much of it improvised), that it just demands multiple viewings in order to fully throw oneself into these characters.

Just take Kelly MacDonald's character, who is adorable as Lady Tretham's maid. She acts as the audience's eyes and ears when traveling down the long and spiraling hallways of the house.

As for the class commentary concerning the upstairs and downstairs, Gosford Park demands comparison with Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game. So much is said with just one action or comment by one of the characters, that we are reminded again that Altman is the master when it comes to social commentary.

By the end, we are fully satisfied with the two hours we've been served of witty dialouge and class commentary that we can only find ourselves, like the many Lords and Ladys of the film, demanding another entree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10WT8Z7qIbI - the trailer hardly conveys the majesty of the film.